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Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century

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Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-20_16 AYŞE YUVA Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century CITE AS: Ayşe Yuva, ‘Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy: French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nine- teenth Century’, in Materialism and Politics, ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 293–312 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-20_16> Materialism and Politics, ed. by Bernardo Bi- anchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: RIGHTS STATEMENT: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 293–312 © by the author(s) Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Interna- tional License. ABSTRACT: The aim of this chapter is to analyse the political uses ofthe categorization of eighteenth-century French materialism as mechan- istic and reductionist. Regardless of the current or outdated character of these materialisms, their rejection and the narratives that endorsed such judgments appear as partly ideological. Using several examples, this chapter will examine how this reductionist image of eighteenth- century French materialism was formed in the nineteenth century. It aims to show that the quarrels about materialism focused at that time on the question of a society’s dominant beliefs. KEYWORDS: materialists of the eighteenth century; French materialism; English materialism; idealism, German; philosophy, Turkish; political science – philosoph; Staël, madame de; Cousin, Victor; Büchner, Lud- wig; Beşir Fuad The ICI Berlin Repository is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the dissemination of scientific research documents related to the ICI Berlin, whether they are originally published by ICI Berlin or elsewhere. Unless noted otherwise, the documents are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.o International License, which means that you are free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate credit, indicate any changes, and distribute under the same license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for further details. In particular, you should indicate all the information contained in the cite-as section above. Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century AYŞE YUVA In contemporary materialist traditions such as Marxism or neo- materialism, reference to pre-nineteenth century philosophers is often limited to a small number of authors: Spinoza, sometimes Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. It is striking that other traditions, such as eighteenth-century materialism, when the very category of ‘materialism’ was forged, or late nineteenth-century scientist materialism, which loudly proclaimed this label, are generally put aside or deemed obsolete. The terms of the accusation are well known: these materialisms are, according to many Marxist materialists, too mechanistic, reductionist, insufficiently emancipatory and subversive, and even judged ‘ideological’ for having justified the capitalist order that was being established at the time. But if we want to understand the philosophical and political reasons for these judgments, it is necessary to take the ‘materialist’ categorization of these doctrines seriously, not to judge them as more or less materialist according to their approximation to a current model. My methodology is, in some way, a nominalist one, since my point of departure is not the universal idea of ‘materialism’ but what has actually been categorized 294 MATERIALISM, POLITICS, HISTORY as such. I will take both a historical and a transnational perspective, briefly analysing some of the alliances of materialism and politics since the eighteenth century in France, Germany — in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Ludwig Büchner — and in some Turkish Ottoman authors. This broader view is important so as to not remain stuck in the identification, which has become commonplace, of an eighteenth-century mechanistic and reductionist materialism as a solely European endeavour. More specifically, my aim is to analyse the political uses of the categorization of materialism as mechanistic and reductionist. I would like to show how, regardless of the current or outdated character of these materialisms, their rejection has often also had an ideological character, as has the narratives that have endorsed these judgments of reductionism and mechanism. To understand how this can be the case, one should bear in mind that materialism is not only about ontological questions relating to the relationship between matter and spirit, but it has also been radically critical of religion, which has led, among other things, to Marx’s and Engels’ critique of ideology as the dominant form of thought. This point also concerns the teaching of philosophy: materialism has been significantly marginalized in universities and in the history of philosophy until the middle of the nineteenth century at least, and arguably later as well. In return, materialist authors have not spared universities and the specific history of philosophy that they teach from a major critique regarding the separation of this teaching from reality. Thus, the erasure of certain materialist traditions is a question that concerns both politics and the history of philosophy. Following authors such as Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey,1 one may wonder to what extent it is possible to adopt a materialist perspective while being a scholar of the history of philosophy, i.e. studying ancient texts, which cannot be transposed as such to the present day — which does not mean that materialism was not somehow efficacious in this time, or that the texts are no longer relevant for us. My own approach is, therefore, to critique the ideology that permeates the practices of the history of philosophy. This is, incidentally, a materialist approach. 1 Cf. Pierre Macherey, Histoires de dinosaure: Faire de la philosophie (1965–1997) (Paris: PUF, 1999). AYŞE YUVA 295 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH MATERIALISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF ORTHODOXY The Connection between Ontology and Politics ‘Materialism’, a term which in French dates back to the early eight- eenth century in a text Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote against Pierre Bayle from 1702,2 was then applied retrospectively to a number of doctrines that emerged since Democritus and Epicurus. In the eight- eenth century, the polemical and politically subversive meaning of the term ‘materialism’ could hardly be separated from its ontological meaning.3 In France, materialism only came out of hiding, and still only partially, in Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s books L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745) and L’Homme-machine (1747).4 The association of ‘materialism’ with ‘fatalism’ and ‘atheism’, for example in the thought of Paul Thiry, baron d’Holbach, was at least as subversive as monism.5 This is not the place to discuss the association, which was made as early as the eighteenth century, between Spinozism and materialism, or the distinctions often made by some materialist authors between Spinoza and their own doctrines. Rather, I would like to point out that the definition of eighteenth-century materialism in terms of mechanism, reductionism,6 and utilitarianism does not do justice to the complexity 2 According to the etymological dictionary, it is necessary to go back in French to Leibniz’s text of 1702 Réplique aux réflexions de Bayle to find the word ‘matérialisme’, which was then translated into English. The adjective ‘materialist/matérialiste’ is a little older and appeared in English around 1660 (in Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and Robert Boyle), in French in 1698 (in Bonaventure de Fourcroy) and in 1700 in the first French translation of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding by Coste. Cf. <http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/matérialisme> and <https://www. cnrtl.fr/etymologie/matérialiste> [accessed 1 November 2020]. 3 Cf. Franck Salaün, L’Affreuse Doctrine: Matérialisme et crise des mœurs au temps de Di- derot (Paris: Kimé, 2014); the classic work of Daniel Mornet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1933) should be mentioned as well. 4 Jean-Claude Bourdin, Hegel et les matérialistes français du xviiie siècle (Paris: Klinck- sieck, 1992), p. 23. 5 This term was used only from the end of the nineteenth century, based on the workof Ernst Haeckel. 6 Even in the work of Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the very complex mechanism cannot be reduced to the model of shocks and to one simple explanation. Cf. La Mettrie, L’Homme-machine (Paris: Fayard, 2000 [1747]), p. 49, translated in The Monist, 3.2 (April 1913), p. 300: ‘Man is so complicated a machine that it is impossible to get a clear idea of the machine beforehand, and hence impossible to define it. For this reason, all the investigations have been vain, which the greatest philosophers have made a priori, that is to say, in so far as they use, as it were, the wings of the spirit. 296 MATERIALISM, POLITICS, HISTORY of materialist texts from the eighteenth century. In these texts the living character,7 not the inert character,8 of matter9 is often discussed; far from referring only to Newtonian physics,10 these texts also use the model of chemistry and the natural sciences to oppose any kind of teleology in living beings. While d’Holbach
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